MyCrypto: A New Beginning From MyEtherWallet Founder

MyEtherWallet Prepares for the Future

In a post on Medium, the founder of MyEtherWallet announced that it had evolved into a full-time product with a team. Because of this, he said it was time for a new beginning, which included a rebranding. As part of the change, the team behind the wallet has overhauled the MyEtherWallet codebase and rewritten it for the MyCrypto platform. However, the MyEtherWallet domain will still be active for now.

A Bit of History

MyEtherWallet started in 2015 as a two-person project. It had a simple interface that wanted to solve a simple issue; when Ethereum first launched, the only way to send Ether to others was via a command line. Obviously, this was something with which most people were not conversant. Initially, the project was part-time and they only did it in their free time. That way, they had the freedom to decide what to do with it.

At the time, the community was small and tight-nit. It was also quite optimistic about the future. As the founders interacted with people who used the product, they were able to grow their knowledge on how to make the project work better. In fact, they had no expectation that MEW would ever grow to be such an important part of the Ethereum blockchain.

2017, the Year it all Changed

2017 started well for the team behind MEW. The flow of users was manageable and it was still a two-man team. They had to pay around $40 a month in server costs and they received about 20 support messages daily. However, in the second quarter of 2017, ICOs exploded onto the scene and newbies arrived, hoping to make money quickly. Suddenly, phishing attacks began to rise.

As the ICOs grew, they reached a level where the site was processing 100,000 transactions an hour. In the previous year, they had only managed to get 100,000 unique visitors a month. By now, the 20 messages daily had grown to 1000 a day. As the price of Ethereum shot up, the need to deal with every tiny problem became more urgent.

The team learned a lot from that experience, but at the time it seemed like pure chaos. It all became so much that the small team of two began to suffer physically. In the third quarter of 2017, things quietened down a bit. The small team began to work on securing their product long-term. They did not want to be unprepared for any more explosive growth in future.

By now, they had started to hire a support team that could also assist with development. They knew that the entire codebase had to be rewritten. In 2018 though, they have managed to launch a new codebase and a new name for their product. They hope to be able to help the Ethereum community throughout 2018 and into the future.

What do you think about the re-branding of MyEtherWallet? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section below.